54 Inspirational Football Quotes

In the world of sports, few things are as universally inspiring and electrifying as football. Whether you're a player, coach, or fan, the sport’s blend of strategy, dedication, and teamwork offers endless motivation. To celebrate this, we’ve curated a collection of the top 54 inspirational football quotes. These words of wisdom, spoken by legendary players, coaches, and commentators, capture the essence of football’s power to inspire and uplift. Join us as we explore these quotes that remind us of the passion, perseverance, and unyielding spirit that make football more than just a game.

1. “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.” - Vince Lombardi

2. “[Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important.” - John Sutherland

3. “The problem with winter sports is that -- follow me closely here -- they generally take place in winter.” - Dave Barry

4. “If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” - Erma Bombeck

5. “Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.” - Lou Holtz

6. “Würde man Rooney als metrosexuell bezeichnen, würde er sich wohl zuerst verwundert am Quadratschädel kratzen und dann vorsichtshalber zuschlagen.” - Raphael Honigstein

7. “Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.” - Elbert Hubbard

8. “The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.” - Eduardo Galeano

9. “And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.” - Eduardo Galeano

10. “Some people think football [soccer] is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.” - Bill Shankly

11. “When it's too hard for them it's just right for us!” - Marv Levy

12. “I like football. I find its an exciting strategic game. Its a great way to avoid conversation with your family at Thanksgiving.” - Craig Ferguson

13. “I love seeing other channels counterprogram the Super Bowl. PBS: "DAMN RIGHT we're airing a new 'Masterpiece Classic'! Fuck off, sports!” - Tara Ariano

14. “football is like life - it requires perserverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.” - Vince Lombardi

15. “The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.” - Terry Pratchett

16. “I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.” - Nick Hornby

17. “wouldn't you like to make sure all those millions you give to Uncle Sam went to schools and hospitals instead of nuclear warheads?'As a matter of fact, he would. Playgrounds for big kids, preschool programs to little ones, and mandatory LASIK surgery for NFL refs.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

18. “The Enemy of the best is the good. If you're always settling with what's good, you'll never be the best.” - Jerry Rice

19. “If teams keep playing us this way, it's going to be like this” - Peyton Manning

20. “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” - George Will

21. “Football is the ballet of the masses.” - Dmitri Shostakovich

22. “He dribbles a lot and the opposition don't like it—you can see it all over their faces.” - Ron Atkinson

23. “When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.” - Robert Stacy McCain

24. “[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.” - Terry Eagleton

25. “Rob Green needed to get the long barrier out, didn't he?” - James Anderson

26. “An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame - Southern Methodist University game and doesn't care who wins.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

27. “It never rains in Autzen Stadium!” - Don Essig

28. “Today I will do what other's won't, so tomorrow I will do what others can't.” - Jerry Rice

29. “Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead. ” - Erma Bombeck

30. “In the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented.” - Bobby Charlton

31. “The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...'Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?'Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.” - Bobby Charlton

32. “Things that aren't important, that have nothing to do with winning and losing, don't have to be a rule.” - Peter Richmond

33. “You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.” - Criss Jami

34. “The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of people are now rewarded for it. They call it football.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

35. “We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.‘That, of course, is the other main difference.” - Hugh Laurie

36. “If you have not seen it, FOOTBALL is a game in which men shove one another back and forth for no reason. They do not choose how, when, or whom they shove. All that has been decided for them in advance. All they need to do is follow the orders given to them before the game, showing them where to run and how to violently deploy the meat of their bodies against the meat that is running at them. They are doing this in order to please one angry old man on the sidelines. This old man is called the "coach" or "yelling surrogate dad who will never be happy.” - John Hodgman

37. “Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.” - Oscar Wilde

38. “There definitely needs to be water on the sidelines for these players, but I also had some Gatorade just in case they were allergic to the water or vice versa.” - john madden

39. “I lost count of the number of referees who came to me both at Derby and Forest and said, 'I'd just like to express my thanks. I love matches involving your team. We never have any trouble with them.” - Brian Clough

40. “You're the only one that can put pressure on yourself... No one else can put pressure on you. It's self-inflicted. For me, I just want to go out and play football.” - Maurice Jones-Drew

41. “Success comes in a lot of ways, but it doesn't come with money and it doesn't come with fame. It comes from having a meaning in your life, doing what you love and being passionateabout what you do. That's having a life of success. When you have the ability to do what you love, love what you do and have the ability to impact people. That's having a life of success. That's what having a life of meaning is.” - Tim Tebow

42. “Is it or is it not a matter of importance that a young man starts out in life with an ability to shut his jaw hard and say "I will," or "I will not," and mean it?” - John William Heisman

43. “You watch pro ball and those guys spend so much time with their hands on each other's rear ends, you'd think they were feeling for diamonds or something.” - Catherine Gilbert Murdock

44. “Ce que je sais de la morale, c'est au football que je le dois.(I know of morality, it is football that I owe.)” - Albert Camus

45. “Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants.” - Ben Fountain

46. “I didn’t answer. We were not buddies. We could not chat about the proximity of our offices, or football, or forgiveness.” - Kimberly Novosel

47. “In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the Texas state religion are celebrated: high school, smash-mouth football. ‘And lo, the children of Jim Bob do take to the roads in caravans and they do go up unto the stadium by tribes, the Indians of Groveton, the Panthers of Lufkin, the Mustangs of Overton, and the very Wildcats of Palestine, and who shall withstand the traffic jams thereof?’ Thus is it written, and so it is and shall be.” - Markham Shaw Pyle

48. “In life as in football, you must keep pressing on till the final whistle.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

49. “Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” - Simon Kuper

50. “You know I'll never say no, and Nate's so dedicated, I think he loves our alpha more than me.""I resent that," Nate grumbled. "I might love football more than you, but definitely not Lucas's ugly mug.” - Nalini Singh

51. “If you're ashamed to stand by your colours, you better seek for another flag.” - Mokhtar Dahari

52. “Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!” - Daniel Gilbert

53. “It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.” - Nick Hornby

54. “The Greatest” is a bite-your-tongue-book. Ultimately a tragic tale it is also immensely uplifting and easily the best footballer biography I have ever read.” - Mike Parry